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About Paleo Retiree

Onetime media flunky and movie buff and very glad to have left that mess behind. Formerly Michael Blowhard of the cultureblog 2Blowhards.com. Now a rootless parasite and bon vivant on a quest to find the perfectly-crafted artisanal cocktail.

12 Responses to Linkage

I think it’d be helpful from here on out to replace “diversity” and “diversification” with “Mexicans” and “Mexification.”

Blacks as a percentage are going to be sliding, and have always been a slowly growing population. Blacks just don’t soar in numbers, in Africa (the most underpopulated continent) or elsewhere. The life strategy of “live fast and die young” doesn’t make for a successful program for spreading and growing. They’re now being kept like zoo animals through wealthy donors, an exotic species for the white liberals to gawk at and pride themselves on how black-friendly they are. But not letting their numbers get too out of control.

The real surge in growth, causing greater diversity, is from “Hispanics” — not the black ones like Dominicans and Puerto Ricans who, like English-speaking blacks, don’t grow or spread beyond the boundaries of liberal white donor pools. It’s the Mexican ones, with a history of genetic and cultural adaptations to large-scale agriculture, who are multiplying and multiplying.

Conservatives, groping for a rationalization for trucking in cheap dry-wallers and leaf-blowers, touted Mexicans as a better minority group to have around than blacks. Except those advantages that allow them to displace blacks won’t just stop there. They’ll easily spread way beyond to swallow up a good deal of what used to be white America. But hey, we needed our leaves blown for five bucks instead of ten like that price-gouging white guy was asking, so bequeathing a 70% Mexican population to the unborn generations is just the price they’ll have to pay for our stinginess. We all have to make sacrifices around here.

“In Jewish American literature, too, the conservative temperament has always been central, as Jewish writers struggle to remain attached to the past even as they negotiate their place in the future.” (some Jew quoted at TAC)

Attached to *whose* past? Here is the central weakness of one ethnic group’s conservatives embracing another’s — they don’t want to conserve the same thing. Mexicans want to conserve the Mexican way of life. Gee, that’s better than liberal Americans who want to betray their own past, so I guess Mexicans are more conservative than us after all, and are the rightful heirs to this country. Uh-duhhhhh.

I’d hate to see “conservatives” supporting the arts in a way that encourages attachment to the past, regardless of whose past it is. That’s a recipe for multicultural antagonism and inter-ethnic one-upsmanship. Our past was different from / better than / harder to live through than your past. We’re all just supposed to respect and celebrate each other’s pasts, as long as they were discovered by earnest conservative reflection.

“I’d hate to see “conservatives” supporting the arts in a way that encourages attachment to the past,”

With all due respect, Ag, “attachment to the past” is a big part of what conservatism is about. And as for the question of “whose past” this is a big part of why multiculturalism doesn’t work. I personally like the fact that Mexicans love and want to celebrate their past, and I encourage them to do it – IN MEXICO. I like the fact that a man loves his country and his past, just like I like the fact that he loves his wife. But when he wants to love my wife – well. we’re going to have problems…

This is why we have countries. This shouldn’t be too hard to figure out.

The context is Jewish pseudo-con praise for staying attached to their past, even as they continue to influence Western countries, and the conflicts and contradictions that this and other competing camps of conserving the past will create even within a single country.

Are you going to tell the Jews you appreciate their attachment to the past — you just wish they’d do it back in Poland? I would.

When a man loves his country, when there is little to love, that is nothing for conservatives to tip their hat to.

While Fred Reed was busy satirizing the Yankees, he forgot to take the time to keep them from invading his home state. The Governor is an upstate New Yorker, and neither Senator is southern (one is Midwestern, the other a Midwestern-New England hybrid). The most illustrious homegrown politician, Representative Eric Cantor, was a gold-worshiping immigrant-loving Jew.

Fred’s hometown of Fredericksburg saw 26% growth during the first decade of the 21st century — I wonder whether that was an unnoticed baby boom among native Virginians, or hordes of white transplants from blue states, along with Mexican peasants, overwhelming the soon-to-be minority of Virginians who have deep roots there.

But for the late Silent Gen and Baby Boomers, it’s always the 1960s and ’70s. Virginia is still a mostly Virginian place, and gets to satirize the Yankees, who are still staying in their own part of the country.

I hear a lot of this stuff from Virginians, whether they are proud of or ashamed of its Southern associations. But true Southern states have not turned out that way. The Governors and Senators in the Deep South are natives of their state, from birth through law school (leaving to take your J.D. from Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Chicago, etc., disqualifies you from holding office down there). Blue state refugees are not transplanting themselves en masse to South Carolina, Alabama, or Mississippi, radically and perhaps irrevocably altering their culture.

I think being so close to the North has given Virginians a chip on their shoulder, whereas Alabamians don’t feel like they’ve got something to prove. Or to be more charitable, Virginians may have a keener awareness of the Yankee / Southern divide by living right along the fault-line.

In either case, over the past 20-odd years Virginians have been more concerned with defending their land rhetorically rather than physically. And in the blink of an eye, it’s been colonized and annexed by the Bos-Wash culture.

Farther down south, the sting of carpet-baggers during the first Gilded Age has never gone away. These days, there’s an unofficial, tacit understanding not to let outsiders move in and begin taking over, whether it’s business owners, politicians, or residents looking for cheap land to gentrify.

The Deep South has proven far more robust than the border region of Virginia and North Carolina (also swamped by blue state transplants). They seem more interested in celebrating local culture and tuning out the Yankees altogether, except when agitated, and then only getting in a quick dig (a la “Sweet Home Alabama”) and moving on with local life. Getting mired in a culture war would sap their attention and allow sneaky colonists to gobble up their land.

Lindsay Graham (aka Lindsay Grahamnesty), Republican senatorr from South Carolina, is one of those White Southern native politicians. They are just as capable of selling out their constituents as the carpet baggers.

The worst infested is North Carolina. Charlotte, Raleigh, and Durham are all 10-15% Hispanic. And those three plus Chapel Hill have seen double-digit growth for many decades now. No baby boom lasts that long — this comes from outsiders colonizing a state that’s let its guard down.

Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana are still remarkably free of spics, 5% at most. And the cities there are either stable or declining in population — Birmingham, Mobile, Jackson, New Orleans. Not serving as Sunbelt boomtowns for blue state refugee gentrifiers.

Too many rich people kill a town and New York, like London and Paris, is a victim of its own success. I don’t know any more boring type of human being than those financial types who because of habit, avarice and status kill creativity and culture.. Jane Jacobs and Stuart Brand noticed the same.

Regarding sociology and culture and their interaction Harry Lime’s monologue in the The Third Man sums it up nicely:

“Holly, I’d like to cut you in, old man. There’s nobody left in Vienna I can really trust, and we’ve always done everything together. When you make up your mind, send me a message – I’ll meet you any place, any time, and when we do meet old man, it’s you I want to see, not the police. Remember that, won’t ya? Don’t be so gloomy. After all it’s not that awful. You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long Holly.”

For culture to thrive their needs to be a little messiness. To much order gives you the “excitement of Geneva.” New York is heading that way.

I was in Manhattan for every second of the 1970s and 80s and I recommend against romanticizing it. The art, culture and music that is being produced there today is as good as or superior to what we did in the 70s and 80s. It is a joy to be in a New York where crime is no longer taken for granted, every window is not barred or grated, and the subway cars are not a nightmare of graffiti-ed out neglect. I left NYC in the depths of the Dinkins administration after experiencing racial attacks in my mixed-race neighborhood, amid the bizarre racial climate subsequent to the Central Park jogger rape. There was absolutely no indication that the city would ever pull itself out of the hole it was in. But amazingly, it did. I sold a co-op for under 100K that is worth well more than a million today. Yet I’m not bitter. I’m pleased that anyone, rich or poor, is able to enjoy a crime-free city. Anyone who wants to experience the atmosphere of NYC in the 70s and 80s can move to the mid-sized, midwestern city where I live now, or any of the many like it. You can enjoy cheap housing, crap policing, and the pleasure of discovering little bars, restaurants and ethnic enclaves. (I personally, live in the suburbs, which are just this side of utopia. But that’s another story.)

Sale makes good points in his secession argument. A quibble: even if support for some kind of succession runs around 25%, it doesn’t really folllow to calculate support at one quarter of the entire US population and then announce in italics that that number is greater than the number of people who voted for Obama.

Also I think that even of small is beautiful, we are left with grappling with why big has been as successful as it has. These things proceed by a kind of natural selection, not by following abstract principles that sometimes make sense and sometimes do not. It could well be that we are entering a phase in civilization where small beats big. I can certainly grasp small’s aesthetic and cultural appeal. But big also means things like a big stick, big money and big aircraft carriers. Sometimes it doesn’t do to rely on Switzerland for such things.